Release Wave 2: Dynamics365 Sales

Part 1 of our Microsoft Dynamics release Wave 2 review begins with updates in 365 Sales. We wanted to introduce the new and upcoming features coming to your sales environments and give a quick spotlight to some of our favorites. Microsoft has broken down the new additions under different investment areas to give us a better idea of how and where these new features should be used. 

  • Conversation intelligence - Use analytics and data science to gain insights based on data gained from sellers’ call recordings and Dynamics 365 Sales. 

  • Forecasting and pipeline intelligence - Forecast revenue, track team’s performance against targets, and identify pipelines risks 

  • Reporting - Standardized reports allowing users to gauge the performance of teams and individuals using the application 

  • Sales accelerator and process automation - Enable sellers to engage efficiently with prospects and customers across multiple channels. 

  • Teams and Outlook collaboration – Enable sellers to be productive where they are 

 

Conversation Intelligence (CI)  

 Capture every customer interaction – This feature provides an updated interface to provide business on all outbound and inbound calls Microsoft teams calls. This includes calling through the Teams dialer within Dynamics 365 sales and calling from your mobile device using Teams. This allows users to have access to the same quality of insights regardless of their chosen communication channel. 

Correlate conversation style to business outcomes – A great feature that works with your CI dashboards to find useful information such as how keywords, customer sentiments, and conversation style are affecting business outcomes. You can also check out conversation style trend charts to analyze how sellers’ conversational behavior has changed over time. Simply put, this tool allows you to see the strong and weak points in your conversations, adjust your style accordingly and track your progress over time.  

Get tips while on a call with customers – Another cool use of AI that can gives you easy access to helpful information while on a sales call. Some of the suggestions include information and talking points on product and service details, competitive battle cards, pricing and more. Really, this is putting all your relevant sales information into one place that can help you to know what to say next when a sales call gets tough.  

 

Use AI-powered insights to guide your customer conversations - Don’t see how this is different from the first one 

 

Forecasting and pipeline intelligence 

Override column headers in the forecast grid – An incredibly helpful yet simple feature that allows administrators to add descriptions, tooltips, and translations to the column headers. Use the language that works best for your organization and help your sales team understand the data at their disposal more effectively.  

Reporting 

Access comprehensive and standardized Sales product insights – Gives managers and administrators insight on the CRUD (create, read, update delete) operations performed by different users. This analysis can be performed on all COLA (contact, opportunity, lead, and account) entities. Basically, it allows bosses to see who is making the most effective use of the software. 

Track your progress using seller dashboard – provides sellers with a dashboard giving them a summarized view of their activities’ progress across the contacts, accounts, leads, and opportunities they’re involved in. Another useful data visual to see all your work progress in a centralized location.  

 

Sales accelerator and process automation updates and improvements 

Engage your customers with SMS – Managers can now connect with the service provider of their choice for sending and receiving SMS. Allows users to send SMS from the Sales accelerator workspace, SMS templates, and add SMS and automated SMS as a step in a sequence. You can also access past SMS interactions in context with relevant entities like lead and opportunity records. Overall, it provides another channel to engage customers with support features included. 

Customizable worklist cards – Provides sellers with customizable worklist cards for different entity types allowing them to get the proper contextual information on the work items.  

 

Feature Spotlight 🔦 

Enhanced sequence creation experience – This update provides a more user-friendly experience that makes it easier for users to create and design news sequences. The pop-up functionality simplifies the process of adding sequence steps, conditions, and commands.  

 

 

 It additionally adds more functionality to discover and provide an exit criterion for a sequence, adding exit icon to end of sequence branches, and save all changes to sequence steps with a single click. A new top command bar has also been added featuring relevant options and enhanced error handling capabilities to ensure sequences work properly.  

This is a good update to sequences that creates a more consistent automation experience across Marketing’s customer journeys and Sales’ sequences.  

Use sequences and Up next with any form – Gives users the ability to embed the Up next widget in any entity form to guide their next actions. You can also use sequences to guide users on any page or form and all salespeople have been granted privileges to create and connect sequences. This is an excellent feature because it expands the use of Up next while also enabling salespeople to take charge of their own sequences.  

Identify duplicate leads and contacts – A straightforward feature that makes duplicate detection easier by allowing users to configure additional business parameters.  

Use A/B testing in sequences – Help to improve the sales process using A/B testing in sequence. Allows use of A/B test email steps from within the sequence to get feedback on the optimal engagement method 

Improve assignment accuracy using segment priority – Gives the ability for administrators to assign priority to each segment. Currently created records pass through segments in a random order, leading to inaccurate assignments. By assigning priority to segments it leads to more precise assignment of records to the respective sellers and sequences.  

Coach sellers with manager dashboards and improve seller efficiency with KPIs – Provides the manager dashboard enabling sales managers to view their team’s and sequence’s performance according to KPI’s like: time taken to convert leads and opportunities, the conversion ratio between leads and opportunities and success rate of sequences. A useful tool for managers to monitor their employees' work and provides a coaching opportunity for sellers by showing them their data.  

Guide sellers to work simultaneously – Can now assign different sequences to different sellers for a particular sequence at the same time. For example, you can assign one sequence to an account executive and another to a solution architect while they’re both working on the same target account.  

Improve lead engagement rates with validated emails – This useful tool allows administrators to run a partial or full review across all email addresses maintained on active leads within the organization to check for addresses that are invalid, inactive, temporary or tests. This information is then passed along to sellers via both their worklist card and Up next widget. A super useful tool to get quick validation on active emails and identify the outliers to ensure a lower bounce rate and a more accurate engagement rate. 

Improve process efficiency using sequence insights – Sequence insights will allow managers to analyze sequence steps to see their performance, identify the deviation of the process, and identify the communication channels that work best for their business. This is a great capability that will allow managers to learn what does and doesn’t work within their existing sequences, to optimize them and subsequently design better sequences in the future.  

Teams and Outlook collaboration  

Microsoft Viva sales - Viva Sales is a new application designed to provide sellers with actionable AI-powered sales insights within their flow of work. Described by Microsoft “Viva Sales works through an integrated set of capabilities in Microsoft 365 and Teams and designed to improve seller productivity, streamline sales team collaboration, and enable deeper customer engagement by bringing customer context from the CRM into the seller’s flow of work “. Basically, it appears that Viva Sales will function to make available data even more accessible by providing AI-powered intelligence within workflow applications without the need to enter the CRM.  

If you have any questions about how these features can be incorporated into your strategy, want training on some of the latest update features, need assistance with the update, or just want to chat Click here to book some time with one of our team members, we will be happy to help you out!